1. Field of the Invention
The object of the invention is a system and method as claimed in claim 4 for use in a motor vehicle, wherein the system comprises a navigation system and a control unit designed such that a list of goods, stored in the control unit, is used to generate a route of stops for the purchase of the goods.
2. Related Art
When labeling goods and products, labels which have a near-field transponder are increasingly used. It is possible, using the near-field transponders attached to the goods and products to obtain information relating to the labeled goods or the labeled products with the aid of a near-field reader or another near-field transponder. This concerns in particular the type of goods, the price and other information such as shelf-life or other information. It should be noted at this juncture that “products” and “goods” will be used as interchangeable terms in the following text.
It is possible, using a near-field reader, to identify the products located in the trolley inside, for example, a supermarket or a store, with the result that only the reader needs to be presented at the checkout or the price of the purchased products is debited from an account when the trolley passes through a gate. Such a method is described, by way of example, in US patent 2004/0103034 A1.
Furthermore, it is already known in the prior art to store in electronic form, a shopping list with products or goods to be purchased. This is frequently referred to as the “intelligent fridge”, which is capable by itself of generating a shopping list with goods that are about to run out. Such a list can then be transmitted to a control unit. Devices with personal information management (PIM) software, such as, for example, cell phones or personal digital assistants (PDAs), are used nowadays as the control unit.
The list, which is often stored in electronic form, can be used in particular for purchasing all the products entered in the list in as intelligent a sequence as possible. The intention here is to prevent a situation where first a product A is purchased in a store and then another store is visited in order to purchase product B, only to then discover that the remaining product C must likewise be purchased in the first store. Document JP 2003308409 A1 discloses a method to remedy this. In the method, the user of a motor vehicle inputs the starting point and the destination point of the motor vehicle into the navigation system and transmits the list of goods to be purchased to a server. The server selects from a database a preferred location for purchasing the products to be purchased and compiles a route from the information obtained from the server, by which route the targeted stores for purchasing all the products stored on the list can be reached within the shortest possible distance or shortest possible time.
A disadvantage of this method is that once a route is compiled, it can no longer be adapted dynamically in order to react to products that are not available in one of the targeted stores.